Category I: Crossing the Divide Between Today's Practice and Tomorrow's Science

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Advances in scientific applications and user interfaces have democratized the availability and accessibility of advanced research computing systems, allowing a broader range of researchers to pursue answers to ever more complex problems. Further, advances in computational and data-intensive research techniques are employed in a growing number of fields, both as primary methods of investigation and as complements to traditional modeling and simulation methods. Underpinning these advances is an accelerating shift in many research applications away from traditional processors to the vastly parallel floating-point processors available in modern computer graphics hardware. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will deploy and operate Delta, an advanced computing and data resource that will capture the essence of change in technology and practice that NCSA, as a global leader in advanced research computing, pursues in its mission to advance human understanding.Delta will advance the productivity and usability of advanced computing resources by deploying modern interfaces, such as science gateways and other web-based interfaces that will both improve usability and provide results to researchers in real-time. Federation across the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem will enable integration as a component of multi-site workflows that include campus, national, and commercial cloud resources. NCSA will partner with the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) to implement the science gateway infrastructure that will enable broad communities of researchers to take advantage of the advanced computing and data analytics capabilities of the system. Significant development will take place to evaluate and advance the accessibility of Delta by individuals with disabilities and to disseminate these advances throughout the broader research computing and data ecosystem. NCSA will take an active role in identifying applications and research teams that have the greatest potential for application acceleration through the adoption of GPU computing, thus greatly expanding the adoption of GPU-based computing as a growing norm and reducing time-to-solution for a broad range of research endeavors.The Delta system will be a unique addition to the NSF-funded ecosystem of advanced computing resources due to its balanced mixture of a substantial GPU capability alongside more traditional CPU processing capabilities. Taking advantage of next-generation processor architectures and NVIDIA graphics processors, Delta will include what will be, at its launch, the most performant GPU computing resource in the National Science Foundation portfolio with its 800+ graphics processors.The compute elements of Delta will employ an advanced network interconnect, delivering at least 100 gigabits per second of bandwidth to each compute node for application communications and access to an innovative storage environment. Data-intensive research will be accelerated by a nearly 10 petabyte high-performance storage subsystem, which incorporates three petabytes of flash-based, relaxed-POSIX file system which NCSA will use to demonstrate the effectiveness of modern file systems in advancing the performance of data-intensive and high-performance computing applications.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.